Buddhist Doctrine

Being Choiceless

The basic thing to be understood is that you are not the mind – neither the bright one nor the dark one. If you get identified with the beautiful part, then it is impossible to disidentify yourself from the ugly part; they are two sides of the same coin. You can have it whole, or you can throw it away whole, but you cannot divide it.

And the whole anxiety of man is that he wants to choose that which looks beautiful, bright; he wants to choose all the silver linings, leaving the dark cloud behind. But he does not know that the silver linings cannot exist without the dark cloud. The dark cloud is the background, absolutely necessary for silver linings to show.

Choosing is anxiety. Choosing is creating trouble for yourself.

Being choiceless means: the mind is there and it has a dark side and it has a bright side – so what? What has it to do with you? Why should you be worried about it?

The moment you are not choosing, all worry disappears. A great acceptance arises, that this is how the mind has to be, this is the nature of mind – and it is not your problem, because you are not the mind. If you were the mind, there would have been no problem at all. Then who would choose and who would think of transcending. And who would try to accept and understand acceptance?

You are separate, totally separate. You are only a witness, and nothing else.

But you are being an observer who gets identified with anything he finds pleasant – and forgets the unpleasant is coming just behind it as a shadow. You are not troubled by the pleasant side – you rejoice in it. The trouble comes when the polar opposite asserts – and then you are torn apart.

But you started the whole trouble. Falling from being just a witness, you became identified. The biblical story of the fall is just a fiction. But this is the real fall – the fall from being a witness into getting identified with something and losing your witnessing.

Just try it once in a while: let the mind be whatever it is. Remember, you are not it. And you are going to have a great surprise. As you are less identified, the mind starts becoming less powerful, because its power comes from your identification; it sucks your blood. But when you start standing aloof and away, the mind starts shrinking.

The day you are completely unidentified with the mind, even for a single moment, there is the revelation: the mind simply dies; it is no longer there. Where it was so full, where it was so continuous – day in, day out, waking, sleeping, it was there – suddenly it is not there. You look all around and it is emptiness, it is nothingness.

And with the mind disappears the self. Then there is only a certain quality of awareness, with no “I” in it. At the most you can call it something similar to “am-ness,” but not “I-ness.” To be even more exact, it is “is-ness” because even in am-ness some shadow of the “I” is there. The moment you know its is-ness, it has become universal.

With the disappearance of the mind disappears the self. And so many things disappear which were so important to you, so troublesome to you. You were trying to solve them and they were becoming more and more complicated; everything was a problem, an anxiety, and there seemed to be no way out.